Alternate Seat of TYR

There is no crisis, dammit

A senior union source told The Observer that it was clear Alexander had jumped the gun as the Treasury attempted to show it was taking a hard line on the burgeoning pensions bill.

“Danny Alexander has been reined in by the Cabinet Office,” said a union source. “What he did was inflammatory and showed no sense of the seriousness of these issues for people’s lives.”

Did the senior union source really? Probably he said the bit that was directly quoted, but I doubt anyone senior in a union would talk about a burgeoning public-sector pensions bill. Because there is no such thing. No. There is no crisis.

It is not, in fact, burgeoning. It is shrinking. Wilting. It falls year on year for the next forty odd years in the worst case scenario. This is not the work of subversive Bolshevik infiltrators, either, but of the government’s own actuaries.

“It’s an uncomfortable truth, but I’m afraid it’s the reality, that the world is changing around us and people are living for much longer, and we have not been paying for those extra years of pensions – the taxpayer has. Strikes won’t make this problem go away, we have to act now. If we don’t act now, it’s our kids who are going to pick up the tab, and it’s not right.”

Well, the problem is going away. Strikes or no strikes.

Hutton can’t plead ignorance. It’s in his own report. Iain Duncan Smith commissioned it but he’s not read it either:

He is expected to say: “We’re heading towards an unprecedented burden being placed on the next generation who will have to pay for their parents’ retirement on top of paying for the national debt. It’s not fair. This bill will address the realities of our increasing longevity by sharing the costs between the generations. We will stand by the 2018 and 2020 timetable.”

It’s precedented alright – the precedent is now. It goes down from now on if we do nothing. Doing nothing fixes the problem.

Now, I don’t expect very much from the pundit-wanker types like Patrick “Unseasonably Mild” Wintour or Toby “Toby” Helm. They’re beyond help. But Allegra Stratton is usually worth reading in the Grauniad because she’s a reporter rather than a pundit wanker political editor. However, even she didn’t find it worthwhile to read the report or even just to look at a couple of blogs, or if she did she didn’t think it newsworthy that this whole row is being sold to the public on false pretences, in total and absolute denial of the facts.

In the opinion of the people whose business it is to pay them, public sector pensions will cost less every year from here on in.

Surely, if you’re writing a story about a labour-management dispute over pensions, it’s incumbent on you to say something about the state of the pension scheme involved? It’s as if the Islington Gazette covered Friday night stabbings without mentioning the location, the motive, or even that a knife was used. But national press journalism seems to inject people with some sort of morally fattening and neutralising hormone. And this is the Guardian!

Ian Naismith, head of pensions market development for Scottish Widows, said although more people were saving adequate amounts towards retirement in the public sector, and the changes will still leave them with reasonable pensions, those in the private sector who are saving towards retirement are contributing a bigger proportion of their earnings — 9.7% compared to 9.3%.

Well, they oughter as they probably don’t get any employer contributions.

Sadly, the Grauniad‘s hack doesn’t mention them at all at any point and you have to rely on one Ken Chu, an NHS sysadmin, who gets randomly voxpopped to raise this issue. But the paper has bigger fish to fry. Scottish Widows’ “head of pensions market development” – yes, really – has to get his sales-driven “research” in the media somehow. No doubt the nice lady from SW will be striding along the beach in next week’s glossy for a sizable payment.

To finish, and repeat:

There is no crisis and everyone in the newspapers is lying to you, personally, quite deliberately.